


Dream a Little Dream

by IneffableAlien



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Double Entendre, Elias in prison, Emotional Manipulation, First Love, Homophobia, M/M, Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), The Magnus Archives Season 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:54:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26550955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IneffableAlien/pseuds/IneffableAlien
Summary: “That, Jon,” he said, “was my first real brush with supernatural power.  Can youfeelhow scared I was?”In a timeline where Elias was arrested immediately after Gertrude's body was found, Elias has to get creative to remain close to his Archivist.He makes himself surprisingly vulnerable.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Jonah Magnus/Original Male Character(s)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 45





	Dream a Little Dream

**Author's Note:**

> **About the AO3 Warning:**
> 
> Jonah's statement is a coming-of-age "first love" story. _He specifically says that he was eleven years old at the time._ We are not given the other boy's age, but Jonah describes both of them as children. It is up to the reader to decide how reliable Jonah's narration is. **_Nothing_ is described in any detail but it is heavily indicated that the relationship was sexual.**
> 
> Also, even though this is not overt Jonelias and Jon really wants to hate Elias here, some attraction is implied. I simply cannot write these two and not insert a little UST, as a treat.

“All I need from you is your statement,” Jon snarled, his mobile phone pinned between his ear and shoulder. He jabbed a notepad aggressively with his pen, tearing the top sheet. “There is nothing social about this call.”

“Jon, humor me,” Elias said on the other line. “It is so hard to find intelligent conversation in here.”

“Yes, well, I’m sure I’m very sorry for you,” Jon shot back. “Maybe you should have thought of that before you became a murderer.”

“Ah, and don’t you find it interesting,” Elias said smoothly, “that Martin knew precisely which tape to grab as evidence of that when he made his great discovery?”

Jon slapped the pen he’d been abusing down on the desk and sat a little straighter. “And what is that supposed to mean?”

“Well, I’m definitely not implying what you seem to be inferring,” Elias said, tone twinkling with amusement. “Oh!,” he continued, clearly mocking, “but perhaps he had a guardian angel guiding his fingers! Or a puppet master, pulling the strings …” He switched gears before Jon could reply. “Irregardless,” he said, “I would keep an eye on that one. I certainly plan to.”

“Good luck with that,” Jon said sneeringly. “I don’t foresee you being able to _‘keep an eye on’_ anyone at the Institute any time soon.”

Elias stayed eerily silent to that, leaving Jon queasy and confused. “And don’t say ‘irregardless,’” Jon huffed, to break the silence. “That’s not a real word.” Jon shifted in his chair, allowing himself to protectively sink into the familiarity of his role. “Just tell me what happened. From the time you heard the fire alarm, to …” Jon trailed off, grimacing in the otherwise empty office. _“Tell me what happened after you heard the fire alarm.”_

Elias let out a slow sigh, possibly disappointed, and Jon was peeved to realize how that hurt. Why should he crave the approval of a brutal killer? “You know,” Elias said, not unkindly, “you’re not exactly the most … _compelling_ interviewer. But I have faith that you’ll grow.”

“What are you— I don’t care about that, I need your statement!” Jon snapped.

“Yes, Jon,” Elias said teasingly. “I will give you a statement, I assure you.” Elias dropped his register, sounding conspiratorial. “Would you like to know why I killed Gertrude Robinson?”

Jon’s stomach dropped, and his chest seemed coiled tight. Elias was going utterly off-script, naturally. He knew why Jon was calling; Jon had collected every employee statement regarding Jane Prentiss’s attack on the Institute, save for Elias’s. He had been forced to wait a week while Elias was being processed in prison.

Elias had to have a deadly serious ulterior motive for trying to derail the subject so dramatically. Besides, inmate phone calls were recorded, so even if Elias wanted to come clean with Jon, how much could he do so under the circumstances?

But how could Jon say no to an offer like that?

“Is that the statement you want to make?” Jon asked shakily.

Elias laughed. “Careful, Jon,” he warned, “if I didn’t know any better, from the sound of your voice I’d think you were physically starving to hear it.” Jon heard a sound like metal scratching on metal, as Elias presumably adjusted how he sat.

“Stop stalling,” Jon grumbled. “How long does a prisoner even get to be on the phone?”

Elias hummed. “Not long,” he confirmed. “Unfortunately, that means that if you truly wish to understand _everything,_ that will take multiple phone calls.”

Jon groaned, leaning back and pinching the bridge of his nose. “Is that right,” he said rather than asked. Even from prison, it felt like Elias was always the one in control.

“I’m sorry I can’t tell you things from the safety of the Institute, Jon,” Elias said. “It’s not like I planned to get arrested this way.”

“You make it sound like you planned to get arrested some other way,” Jon said wryly.

“Not necessarily,” Elias replied cryptically, “but none of my various contingency plans accounted for this particular situation. So, I have to make the best with what I have. And what I have,” Elias continued, “is more stories than you can possibly imagine from guessing how old I am, and an Archivist who should very much want to hear them.”

Jon’s foot jiggled as if on its own accord under the desk. “I _should_ want to hear your worms statement first,” he muttered.

“But you don’t,” Elias whispered gently. Jon shivered. “Not when you can smell that something meatier is on the stove.” He chuckled.

“Fine,” Jon growled. Elias had him. He set his phone face up on the desk and put it on speaker. Then, he jabbed at a button on a tape recorder that lay beside it, starting the plastic wheels of the cassette spinning. “Statement of Elias Bouchard, _former_ Head of the Magnus Institute, regarding …”

“A book. Last known to be in the possession of a childhood bully.”

Jon swallowed. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, “what was that?”

“My statement,” Elias drew out the words meaningfully. “It’s about a book, that was taken by a bully when I was a child.”

“I see,” said Jon, who had gone considerably paler.

Jon knew he should stop this. He knew this was bound to be completely irrelevant to the sort of statement he had set out to take.

He found he could not interrupt.

“To understand the events leading to the death of Gertrude Robinson,” Elias started, “we must first go back much further than it.” Elias sounded more professional now, his usual clipped tone returning, but his vowels were rich as always, and Jon couldn’t help but melt into listening. A beat passed, and Jon blinked to life when Elias spoke again: “Well? Jon?”

“O-oh!” said Jon. He felt like he had just been caught napping at his desk.

“Archivist,” said Elias softly, “say what you have to say. _There is a certain way these things must be done.”_

“Regarding a book,” Jon let out the words in a rush. He took a breath. “Statement recorded direct from subject, 5th August, 2016. Uh, continue. Please.”

At first everything seemed so still that Jon believed the call must have dropped, and then he thought he could hear a faint crackling in the air. Elias spoke again.

“I was eleven years old the first time I thought I was in love,” Elias shocked Jon by saying. _(What the hell does that have to do with anything?,_ Jon wondered—but he was already hooked.)

“It was summer,” Elias said, “and my family used to visit a small seaside town during the warmer months. Would it surprise you to learn I did not make friends easily?” He did not actually wait for a reply. “I was a lonely child, and certain aspects of social interactions which seemed to come naturally to the other children eluded me. Thus I developed a hobby of people-watching, preferring to maintain my distance while devouring the sight of humanity’s odd quirks and idiosyncrasies so often ignored by others.

“That was how I spotted him. Every day, for about a week, I would watch him wander the shoreline, always by himself. His walk swayed with the edge of the waves, as though the retreating tide were a tightrope and he was determined to remain balanced on it. Occasionally he would pause to pick up a shell, or some other fascinating object that had swept over his feet, and his _smile_ then, Jon … I was a dark and brooding little thing, melancholy, but his _smile_ —it was like sunrise on the horizon, and it broke me open to spill a light of my own in kind.”

Somewhere, in the back of Jon’s mind, a trace of sense was shouting: _This is inappropriate, and useless, and why is he telling you this and what are you playing into—_

(Somewhere, in the back of Jon’s mind, Jon decided he did not hear it.)

“He was beautiful to behold, slim, with strawberry blonde curls,” Elias continued, words still weaving a spell. “And then, one day, while clambering over the boulders that surrounded the dunes, I came boldly close and slipped on the wet surface of a rock. He heard me, and his head snapped to attention so his eyes focused right on me, eyes which were grey and intelligent, although obviously I could not see their color from that distance. What I could see, though, was how they pierced through me … like I would never be able to keep a secret again.”

Jon didn’t know why, but he shuddered.

“We met every day after that, that summer. It was all quite organic. I’m sure I don’t need to spell out for you what all we did together.” Elias laughed warmly, and it shook Jon, to hear Elias be so real. “I was beautiful back then, too, you know,” Elias said coyly, only half-joking. “We made a lovely picture, two pretty youths wrapped around each other all the time. Almost like we were meant to be seen—and we were risky, in where we got wrapped up. There was excitement in thinking we may get caught, that we might _feel_ the press of eyes on us, drinking us in.

“He was an artist,” Elias said wistfully. “He drew me, of course he did.” Jon pictured how smug Elias must look right now. “I do hope you know how it feels someday, to be a muse … to move someone to break down the sum of your parts, and make something that shall not die, long after the human inspiration behind the work is gone.” There was a pause. “There is nothing like it.”

Jon could hear the smile on Elias’s lips.

Then, his mood switched abruptly. “I don’t remember the name of the store where we found the book,” Elias said icily, “or what pulled us in. It doesn’t matter. But there it was, a small, burgundy, untitled picture book, and when I opened it, there they were: pages of copies of every drawing and painting he had ever made of me. Every pose, every act captured in charcoal or graphite, and pictures I never knew of being created, photorealistic representations of the two of us, doing exactly what you’re thinking … and worse, the depictions of the tender moments. The intimacy laid bare.”

Jon caught himself leaning in close to the phone, heart racing.

“I stole it,” Elias said simply. “I tucked it under my arm and I ran—I ran to the rocks, and he raced after me, and I accused him of having something to do with it. I screamed at him, about how could he betray me like this, and he tried to calm me down for almost an hour.”

Jon could hear the tears in Elias’s throat, and he was suddenly faced with the wisdom that Elias was reliving the same terror he had felt as a little boy, as though it were happening now.

Jon realized how delicious that felt, inexplicably.

Jon realized … that Elias definitely knew what he was giving to Jon in this moment.

_But **why?**_

“We were attracting other curious children by this point,” Elias said. “But then in my rage I tore into the book, intending to rip it apart, and it flipped open toward the back pages. And do you know what was on them, Jon?”

Jon had a feeling he might. He said nothing.

“There were more pictures of us, but they weren’t pictures of the past few weeks, of our summer romance. They were pictures _from that day,_ rendered in perfect black-and-white: he and I in the shop discovering the book, how I ran across the sand … even a picture of me as I stood prepared to tear out its pages. Our eyes met, and I saw how he had been crying, and we stood frozen while he recognized the fear in my face and concluded what I had seen in the back of the book. I knew then that he had done nothing wrong, and he placed one hand on mine, gingerly, like I was an animal ready to lash out—and essentially I was.”

“And then?” Jon croaked.

“We were so lost in the moment and scared and needing each other that we had more or less tuned everyone else out. There was a whole group of young people around us now. There was a bully who always roamed with that clique, an older boy, far too big to be justifiably picking on children as small as we were, you know the type.” Elias said that offhandedly, and Jon snorted in derision like he was in no way seriously affected by the remark, but he was trembling in the dim light of the archive.

“He reached down and grabbed it,” Elias said, so helplessly that Jon was having trouble connecting this conversation with the arrogant man he knew. “There’s not much more to tell,” he said. “The rest of the story is by no means paranormal.”

“But what happened?” Jon pleaded.

“I suppose you could say he circulated it,” Elias said. Next thing Jon knew, Elias sounded so prim and proper that it gave Jon the thought that Elias had wadded all his human emotions up into a tight little ball and thrown them away. “There was a scandal. My peers were vicious, my parents were devastated … Suffice to say I was no longer welcome on holidays with them. My family would make other arrangements for me whenever they traveled that time of year.”

“Oh, god, they just—” Jon shook his head. _He_ wants _you to feel bad for him,_ he thought. _He’s a monster, don’t forget that._ “Was it a Leitner?”

Elias scoffed. “Jon,” he said, “who can say how many books like these have spent time in Leitner’s collection?”

“Right, but I mean, was there a bookplate, or … ?”

“I was eleven, Jon … this was a long time ago.”

“Yes, of course,” Jon said quietly. “Now, now wait,” he sputtered, “why did you tell me this, what am I supposed to do with that?”

Somehow, Jon knew Elias was shrugging. _“That,_ Jon,” he said, “was my first real brush with supernatural power. _Can you **feel** how scared I was?”_

“I mean, look,” said Jon, “nothing like that should have ever happened to anyone, but I don’t understand …”

“You won’t understand, Jon,” Elias said. “Not yet.”

“You were going to tell me why you killed Gertrude Robinson!” Jon said angrily.

“That’s not what I said, Jon,” Elias said calmly. “I said that it would take more than one phone conversation for you to understand.”

“Oh, my god …” Jon moaned.

“Jon, my phone time is about to end, so listen carefully,” said Elias. “I am not a man who shares. I have never told anyone that story. It was never my plan to share it with you. But desperate times call for desperate measures.” Elias paused. “You might not always believe this, but I promise you—one thing I never intend to do with you is waste time. That story was important for you to hear. My _fear_ was important for you to hear. _Remember what it is that we do at the Institute.”_

“But I—”

“‘Til next time, Jon. Get some sleep, will you? I know how hard you work. _A man needs time to dream.”_

“I don’t _understand …”_

Elias had already hung up.

Jon dropped his elbows on the desk and scrubbed his face. After a minute, he stopped the tape recorder, then, experimentally, rewound partway to press play.

He jumped at the sharp, distorted squealing that assaulted his hearing.

“What … ? No! I …”

Jon glanced at his phone, still facing up on the desk.

His highly digital, decently modern smartphone.

“Right,” Jon whispered to the shadows in the room.

**Author's Note:**

> xx [siliconealien](http://siliconealien.tumblr.com)


End file.
